What if historians of
American history placed Catholics, their world, and their institutional Church
at the center of their histories? Or if not at the center, at least in a
place well inside the margins? How would that change our
narratives? After all, about one fourth of Americans are Catholic.
Shouldn't we account for their role in American history?

Fortunately, these
questions are exactly what the essays inCatholics in the American Century:
Recasting Narratives ofU.S. History, co-edited by Scott
Appleby and our own Kathy Cummings, seek to explore. They expand on
a "historiographical heresy" Jon Butler
proposed in 1991: to think about American religious history from a Catholic,
not a Protestant perspective. These scholars take this heresy into
American history, not just American religious history.Six scholars play with
the question using subjects from the 1960s to the history of sex and gender to
Latino immigration. Five of these scholars admit that they have not, in
their past books, seriously engaged with Catholicism. (Confession, as
Appleby points out in the conclusion, is good for the soul.)

Robert Orsi (who clearly
had no need to confess he had ignored Catholics in the past) interrogates how
distinctive Catholics are from other Americans. He argues that to
understand U.S. Catholic history, we have to realize that Catholics have lived
at an angle askew to American history. But if we take seriously this
"askewness," as he calls it, we can begin to ask new questions that
challenge our old narratives such as, “How have Catholic saints been agents of
U.S. history?”

Lizbeth Cohen suggests
that considering Catholics in American history is a useful way to account for
the transnational turn in American history. She is using this
interplay in her history of postwar urban renewal in Boston. American
Catholics were, it is clear, shaped both by changes in Rome that were often
influenced by international events (consider how Germany’s treatment of Jews
during World War II influenced Rome’s encyclicals on racial justice). But they
were also shaped by the local.

Tom Sugrue thinks that
looking at Catholics in the 1960s can help us stomp out the compelling but
incomplete story of 1960s exceptionalism. He would rather look at
continuities between the 1960s and earlier eras. Sugrue's essay
ranges over a number of subjects, but I would like to linger on one: Catholic
anti-war protests, for instance, were "shaped by a distinctively Catholic
understanding of the body of Christ [and] took a quasi-sacramental form"
(78). These protestors drew on a long history of martyrdom (and, I would
suggest, a history of sacramental Catholic protest for black rights from the
late 1930s).

R.Marie Griffith points
out that Protestant hegemony has reigned supreme in studies of sex and gender,
serving as an “unmarked category.” In her essay, Griffith shows the diversity
of Catholic approaches to birth control education. In doing so, she
challenges scholars to stop making caricatures of divisive figures. By
taking Catholics seriously in their history of birth control, Griffith argues
that we will be able to see the varied ways Protestants and Catholics
approached gender and sex, and how their interactions shaped one another.

David Gutiérrez explores
what it could look like for scholars of Chicano/Mexicano history to take
religion seriously. He points to how the politics behind the Chicano
movement required rejecting the Catholic Church, and how historians of that
movement often followed suit. Like Cohen, he points out that accounting
for Catholic history can break down the dichotomy between “us” and “them” in
transnational scholarship of the Western hemisphere. Yet he warns scholars
away from the propensity toward "romanticization and hagiography" and
argues that historians must consider how many people "betray their stated
religious and philosophical principles" (132-133).

Finally, Wilfrid McClay
argues that we historians might be living in a moment in American history when
Catholic social thought is useful. McClay argues that,
ontologically, Catholic social thought can help contemporary Americans to move
beyond the self, which Protestantism and American liberalism have largely valorized. This
reliance on the self is unsustainable because it cannot "generate the
solidarities necessary for large and sustained sacrifices and commitments or to
provide nonarbitrary justifications for the fundamental building blocks of the
social order" (148). For us historians (who aren’t usually in
the business of making ontological claims), considering Catholic social thought
alongside Protestant social thinking can uncover a dynamic element of interplay
between the two that was formally hidden. Such a narrative, McClay
argues, "would be built on the knowledge that for most of American history
the Catholic 'other' lurked conspicuously, and not merely incidentally, in the
imagination of leading Americans" (156).

McClay's chapter, by the
way, connects nicely with Heath's post about
evangelicals who have left the political right and suggests the role of
Catholicism in that move. Michael J. Gerson, Wheaton College graduate and
George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, after all, turned to Catholic social
thought to help him sort out politics. As Gerson commented, "I am
not a Catholic . . . But I recognized that my own theological tradition, just
emerging from decades of cultural isolation and anti-intellecutalism, has not
developed a compelling philosophy of public engagement" (140).

In all, I'd
wholeheartedly recommend this book, not only for your reading pleasure, but as
a way to creatively engage the question of what ought to constitute American
history.

I read it on the plane
on the way home from the AHA, picking it up after a fabulous panel that
referred to this book when it asked what was distinctively Catholic about
various contributions to American history. (The panel included Kelly
Baker, Matt Cressler, and Brian Clites.) The book expanded my
intellectual horizons, which was a nice contrast to my position in the
“coveted,” but cramped, middle seat.

Great preview Karen! (And sorry you had a middle seat on the flight home!)

John McGreevy's Introduction is excellent, although short. I have the feeling he was holding back a bit. McGreevy recently shared a chapter at Northwestern from his upcoming book, which is on trans-Atlantic 19th. C. Catholicism through the lens of Jesuits in the U.S. Based on that preview, I'm particularly excited to read more about how he conceptualizes the relationship between communal suffering and Catholic distinctiveness.

Thanks for this review Karen. I think its also worth mentioning that John McGreevy's brief introduction is an excellent survey of other themes and debates that emerge in this volume.

Based on a chapter draft from his next book which was recently presented at Northwestern, I'm guessing that McGreevy has more to say on his own approach to Catholic distinctiveness. In particular, he seems to approach blood and suffering less as collective experiences than markers of individual spiritual growth. I'm very much looking forward to reading the rest of his book when it comes out in a year or two.